Palladian (12 page)

Margaret was standing before her long mirror in a petticoat, her frizzy hair untidy from trying on frocks.

‘Oh, Cassandra!’ – like anyone putting aside the formality of a surname, she used the alternative unnaturally often – it seemed to have a tiresome attraction for her – ‘Cassandra, I was just wondering … would you care to have this frock? I shall never get into it again. It clips in under my behind and will burst asunder soon across the chest. With a little pleat here and here and a bit of easing in on the shoulder, it would be all right. It is scarcely worn.’

But the frock was Margaret and could not be otherwise.

‘What do you think? Try it on.’

Meekly, but outraged, Cassandra slipped her shoulders out of her blouse, let her skirt fall to the floor. Margaret dropped the frock over her head and began pulling in and tweaking, pinning, going round the hem on her hands and knees, pins fringing her mouth. Cassandra, from her superior level, studied the room, the opened drawers revealing a rich untidiness of clothes, the mannish dressing-gown with all the grandeur of looped and whorled and twisted cord, the large shoes lying about.

‘Now look in the mirror.’ Margaret sat back on her heels, her belly rounded beneath the white slip, and her face flushed from all the crawling and bending.

Out of the wide sleeves Cassandra’s arms emerged pathetically, mauve against the cruel blue of the dress.

‘There, that looks heavenly on you. Much better than on me,’ said Margaret enthusiastically. ‘Will you let me cobble it up for you, then?’

Expressing gratitude did not come easily; what would come even less easily would be the miserable business of wearing the dress, as obviously she would now have to.

‘Ben always liked this dress,’ Margaret went on with simple pleasure. Everything she said to enhance the gift, detracted from it.

Cassandra left her sitting on the window-seat, her bare arms among the folds of saxe-blue, the silver thimble tapping and flashing, her face calm with goodwill and satisfaction.

The landing smelt of warm carpet; the kitchen cat lay in the patch of sun which spread in the shape of the window across the floor. Cassandra tidied her hair, picked up her wild-flower book, put on the look of a governess and then paused to listen, fancying she heard running footsteps along the passage.

*

Sophy stood in the doorway of Tom’s room. Her face was so pale that it reflected her red dress. He was sitting by the window drawing.

‘Have you run away?’ he inquired.

‘It was time for me to get up, but she just didn’t come.’

‘She?’ His pen scratched and finicked on the paper.

‘Miss Dashwood?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘What should you think I am doing?’

‘Drawring,’ she suggested.

‘“Drawing.” Don’t talk like a baby.’

She came nearer and looked over his shoulder.

‘What is it? It’s like a skeleton with a bush on his head.’

‘The arteries of the body.’

The fine leaves wavered out like the fingers of a sea-plant.

‘Or one of those natives dressed up like a tree. A medicineman. What’s it for?’

‘Are all your drawings
for
something?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘How do you remember how it all goes? Is it what you have to know to be a doctor? Does Margaret know all this?’ She watched with half-closed eyes, the hair-fine sepia lines fascinating her.

‘It is all immensely inaccurate and rather old-fashioned, the bastard of art and science.’

‘Miss Dashwood says the word differently.’

‘Oh, she does, does she?’

‘She says “bastard”. Like that.’

‘And does she use the word frequently?’

‘It comes in
King John
. It means an armour-bearer.’

‘Is that how Miss Dashwood explains it?’

‘No, I just somehow guessed it meant that.’

He did not remain grave, as the well-intentioned child-lover would have done. He burst into laughter.

‘What
does
it mean then?’ she asked haughtily.

‘A bastard is a … a hybrid.’

‘A hybrid?’

Cassandra could be heard calling.

Sophy went to the door. ‘I have to go and pick a lot of bloody grasses,’ she said.

‘Harsh language is not delightful in a woman,’ he said. It was not altogether true; for her mother had often used the coarsest expressions, but with such coolness and finesse that the shock gave a little tap to the blood, as if she had rapped one flirtatiously with a closed fan; yes, it had been the equivalent of that Edwardian gesture.

‘Sophy!’

‘Well, run along, run along!’ He turned irritably to his drawing.

She opened the door and peeped out. ‘I’m coming,’ she called.
‘Au revoir!’
she said to Tom over her shoulder.

He winced.

‘Did you say “hybrid”?’ she popped back to inquire.

He nodded.

‘I don’t know what that means either.’

‘Run along and pick your grasses, for God’s sake.’

When she had gone, his pen dropped to the carpet and stuck there, quivering by the nib. He could not bother to pick it up, but leant back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Tinty, as a young mother, had dammed up the flow of her children’s emotions. Indifference is a hard state to maintain, but they had done so, faced, they thought, with a worse alternative. By checking their own tears, their own anxieties, they hoped to
check hers. In a small way they had succeeded, but it was nothing compared with the vigilant care which had gone into the effort. Their attitude of heartlessness and immunity had served them well at school and would have served them well indefinitely except for the fact that life cannot always be nudged aside nor love answered and quietened by casual bantering. They had never had practice in dealing with urgent emotions and in such a crisis they could draw on no more experience than an infant. Such a crisis had not arisen for Margaret. Tom had been early overthrown, had failed to recover, and now cloaked himself in melodrama – the laconic drunkard or the sordid roué – to put himself beyond the reach of his mother or other women, or men.fi

As a child, like Sophy, he had kept a diary. Coming from school one day and finding his mother lying down with a soaked handkerchief pressed to her eyes, he knew she had been prying. She pried still. His drawings could only puzzle her. He no longer wrote a diary. He received no letters. (He remembered, as a boy, the patient, gentle and expectant voice at breakfast: ‘Who is your letter from, dear?’ and his fingers folding the paper, slipping it back into its envelope – ‘From a friend, mother,’ and Margaret giggling.) The skeleton of his life was not fleshed over with the clutter of friends and their messages and confidences. Yet still he felt the presence of his mother in his room when he returned to it at night or after lunch. His drawings looked, he fancied, as if they had been scrutinised, his closed desk seemed to warn him mutely, everything looked touched, altered, bearing an imprint. To-day, two of his tablets were missing. He pondered this, lolling in the chair, watching the pen quivering in the carpet like an arrow.

Tinty was going to take the tablets and lie down. She was flustered and frightened about it, the first time she had taken such
a drug. She was convinced that her low spirits were linked with her low blood-pressure … (Margaret with a scornful smile, strapping her arm round and pumping up some peculiar gadget … ‘There you are … perfectly normal … what did I tell you? … Oh, mother, mind that, do! It cost the earth …’ ‘All the same …’ she had begun, but Margaret had snapped up the wooden case and turned away) … the little tablets, she knew, would accelerate her pace and lift her spirits. A friend she had once made in a boarding-house had fallen quite a victim to them and had described her sensations delightfully, how she rose to fantastic levels of happiness so that she was too gay to go to sleep at night and was obliged to take more tablets to put herself to rights.

Tinty, depressed about her son at the time, as at all times, had begged to experiment; but the friend was firm in her resolution not to set another on the primrose path. Tinty had never forgotten that glimpse of the forbidden. (‘I lie down feeling like death and quarter of an hour later spring up and wonder what the hell I was lying there for,’ and ‘When it wears off? Why, then I take another.’)

Now, still troubled about Tom, she had stolen his tablets and, scarcely wondering how or why he came by them, had shut herself stealthily in her room, wound up the clock and set it right, drawn the curtains, and now, taking the tablets with a sip or two of water, swallowed them both. She lay back, her brittle grey hair spread over the pillow, and closed her eyes, relaxed and quiescent, like a good patient going under an anaesthetic.

They had collected rye-grass and waybent, quaking-grass and cock’s-foot, vernal-grass and crested dog’s-tail, foxtail and purple moor-grass.

Down by the lake, yellow frogs leaped away from them and
Cassandra stifled the repulsion which she felt, and went bravely towards the bulrushes with which the lake was nearly solid. The sight was a little fantastic, they stood high, closely serried, the rusty plush heads very still, but the reeds sometimes clashing or lisping together, hanging so sharply bent over, so folded, like a child’s drawing of reeds.

Sophy cut her hands pulling one out. It was taller than Cassandra and she carried it tilted like a lance. ‘We can’t press this in blotting-paper.’

Cassandra agreed, trying to find a little firm ground, free of frogs, to walk on.

Sophy had laid down her grasses to pick the bulrushes and now they were lost.

‘It doesn’t signify,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ Cassandra felt bound to say, ‘they are really not bulrushes at all, but reed-mace. Bulrushes are quite different.’

‘I shall go on calling them bulrushes,’ said Sophy.

Cassandra had once said exactly the same to her father. He had replied: ‘There is nothing more beautiful about a thing than what is true.’ She had not believed him then and did not now and sympathised with Sophy, thinking: ‘Beauty is not all it is cracked up to be, or Truth. There are curious, moving, exciting and fantastic things as well.’ She wished she could have explained this to her father; now it was too late. The dead cannot be answered back, the last word is always theirs.

Sophy’s thoughts may also have been with the dead, for she said: ‘Let us go back through the churchyard and down the avenue.’

Cassandra, unlike Tom, thought it useless to check her morbidity. At the edge of the churchyard, by a little rubbish heap, some pink thumb-bruised poppies with grey leaves had seeded themselves. Sophy laid down the bulrush and began to gather a bunch of poppies. ‘My mother’s favourite flower,’ she
extemporised. Cassandra stood about among the heaps of dead leaves, waiting.

‘I shall go and sit in the porch,’ she said at last.

But Tom was sitting in the porch already. He received her as if she were paying him a call or as if they had an assignation. It seemed quite the usual thing. They sat together on the wooden bench among the missionary notices, behind them the cool darkness of the church and before them the sun on the gravel and Sophy running among the yews with her bunch of pink poppies.

‘She should not be encouraged,’ Tom said, folding his arms across his chest, closing his eyes, as if preparing for a little nap.

‘In what?’ Cassandra asked, although she knew.

‘These prowlings round the churchyard.’

‘Isn’t it wrong to wrench people away from the dead?’

‘No, it is right. Especially with young children. Yes,
wrench
them away. That is the word.’

‘To stifle grief makes it worse.’

‘I doubt if that is true. Besides, what grief has she?’

‘Missing her mother.’

‘My dear Cassandra!’ He opened his eyes and laughed, then closed them again quickly. ‘She was born as her mother died. Their souls had barely time to salute one another in passing.’

‘All the same,’ Cassandra went on stubbornly, ‘she misses her. One can miss what one has never had.’

‘That sounds like Marion. I should like to get Sophy away from here. There is altogether too much of death about the place – the very house is mouldy.’ He moved restlessly. Then handed her a cigarette out of a crushed packet. ‘I am glad she has you, because you are young, but I wish you would not encourage her in this about her mother. Fantasy can be damaging. Reality can’t hold a candle to it, everyday life doesn’t stand a chance. What is she doing with all those poppies?’

‘Putting them on her mother’s grave, I imagine.’

‘She talks to you about her mother often?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Repeats what she had dragged out of Nanny, embroiders it, I am sure, spends her energy inventing what no one will tell her. She feels she lives in the shadow of her mother’s beauty, I do know that. Someone should tell her what she wants to know. If her father can’t make himself do it, you should, or your mother. People are very selfish about death, increase the suffering so needlessly, so unnaturally.’ She had finished thinking about Sophy and was thinking of herself. ‘They will never let you talk about the dead. It embarrasses them. It is only
their
convention – that you must not discuss your mourning, to save them taking trouble. It is to keep
their
minds off sorrow, not the bereaved … They know that isn’t possible. One only wants to talk …’